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Monday, 24 October 2016

Everyone knows that grassland or
herbaceous/scrub vegetation if completely left to nature returns to trees in an
ecological succession. A complete return to woodland will take many generations.

When Worsbrough cemetery opened 150 years ago no one then suspected it would turn into a wood

Gardens usually remain relatively stable as
a result of a gardener’s constant attention. In my cemetery gardens I garden
naturalistically. Although I ‘manage’ the gardens, plants and seed spread
everywhere and my control is ill defined. I want today to look back to how the
gardens have changed.

Many gardeners experience a garden’s
ability to return to trees. Seedlings such as sycamores, birch and ash are
examples of our more difficult weeds! You will have your own personal
examples.

Often a tree seedling might be unnoticed or
even permitted because it looks rather nice. Woe if a householder moves and the
new tenant thinks it to have been planted. After a couple of decades he has a
huge forest tree!

In my cemetery gardens I normally try to
kill unwanted tree seedlings. In some cases I have ‘allowed’ some to grow,
particularly birch. Many have made very fine specimens. Over the years I have
pruned such birch to ‘crown lift’ them to make lovely features. Eventually at
their finest I usually chop them down! I do not dare to let them bigger.

Many birch have established from seed during my period of management

I am afraid some of the Worsbroughbirches ought now be chopped down

In the days when press and television beat
a pathway to my door when Bolton Percy churchyard was famous I was always
pictured looking intensely at a birch tree. Better than my profile!

My chopped down birch usually sprouted to
make new multi-stemmed trees to continue the cycle!

I have to admit that at Worsbrough cemetery
seedling holly and yew are a considerable problem. They insidiously sow
themselves in any spaces and in the case of holly are adept at arising
under plant and shrub cover. I suddenly find very large saplings where they are not very welcome.

I have difficulty in keeping on top of unwanted tree seedlings in the old parts of the cemetery

Several years ago I took time out to dig up
more than a hundred yew seedlings and take them home to give to Peter Williams.
He now has a very fine hedge.

When I had my own clients I worked at a
large garden. Unfortunately I never saw my ‘difficult’ employer but liaised
with his wife. I had a ‘vision’ for a section of the garden and diligently
sprayed out tree seedlings including yew.

I learned several years later that the
owner was dismayed that his yew seedlings never grew! In due course I resigned.

Most landscapes are guided by man.
Unfortunately disruption is often intermittent, misguided, undirected and unskilled. Particularly so in relation to
weeds. Natural ecological progression is repeatedly stilted.

It is then that weeds such as Hymalayan
balsam take over. Banning them by knee jerk legislation does not make a
h’penny-worth of difference! Nor muttering about aliens - our own native
bramble is far more invasive.

This dwarf form of Himalayan balsam has re-appeared every year in my own garden for sixteen years now. If I introduced it into the cemetery would I be committing a crime?

Left to real nature or even to sensible
farming or skilled unfettered ecological management such weeds would never
survive.

Japanese knotweed has evolved to grow
alongside fumeroles at the edge of volcanoes. No wonder when they have years of
opportunity to build huge botanical structures in disturbed soils that have
been stripped of shrubs and trees they take over.

Locals never knew that down here amongst the brambles was a quarter of an acre of eight foot high knotweed (not this actual patch - the snowdrops have been here for 100 years)

I have written before about how I used
glyphosate to eliminate a quarter acre of an eight foot high thicket of
Japanese knotweed in Worsbrough cemetery. It was growing in cleared but
neglected land surrounded by trees. It is a moot point that if the trees had
been allowed to grow it would have got going at all. It is also doubtful that if the surrounding trees were allowed to grow
over and cover the site how long the knotweed would have survived. Perhaps
fifty years?

I read that where Japanese knotweed was
cleared at eighty million-odd pounds cost on the Olympic site that in places it is
starting to regrow! Have they not heard of glyphosate? Japanese knotweed only
regrows if it is allowed to.

What
a pity if with advance planning four or five years earlier with the use of glyphosate
clearing weed would have cost a mere million pound.

My celandine saga

In the early Spring of
the year after I started to spray off the coarse perennial weeds in Bolton
Percy cemetery a lovely golden carpet of lesser celandine Ficaria verna appeared.
Eventual complete transformation of the overgrown wilderness, itself an example
of 'disturbed' landscape would take a decade!

It was a superb complete
golden carpet and in the early years became a backcloth for lovely primroses
and other Spring flowers that self seeded around. The primroses themselves most
have been vestiges of seed suppressed by a fifty year cover of nettles and
brambles and horse radish and things!

I have an old acetate
slide. - somewhere - of this beautiful scene with which I usedto open my cemetery lecture for several decades!

The celandine kept
returning each early March for nye on forty years!

It is a wonderful well
behaved plant. You might not agree but for me it provided six weeks of golden
colour suddenly halted in late April when within a matter of days it
disappeared for the year. The uninformed might have thought I had sprayed it
off with my glyphosate. Not so, never - I loved it too much.

Back home celandine
seeded over my rock garden and most of my lawn! My wife hated it and constantly
chastised me! Good cemetery plants are not necessarily good for the garden.

In the early years I
showed round a party led by a botanist from the National Society of
Conservation of Garden Plants, the NCCPG(phew). Now rebranded as Plant Heritage they were holding a Northern
Conference. Later the visit was reported in their National Journal which
described the superb golden carpet of aconites. Somewhat up market from
celandine. Even today Winter aconites refuse to naturalise for me – anywhere.

The relevance to my
story of changing landscape is that four years ago my celandine failed to reappear in Spring!

My own best analysis of
what might have happened is this. Over the years local birds and wild animals
had started to graze nutritious celandine and had started to make it a
principle item in their menu. We had two very dry Springs.The second Spring dry winds persisted through
February and March. The normal luxuriant celandine growth was suppressed. With
little cover to protect them the celandine were eaten to death.

We have now had a lovely
wet warm Spring but they have not returned. Just a few huddle away under covering
shrubs!

I suspect I won't be
around long enough to see that carpet again.

Changing times

Both my cemetery
gardens are a kind of controlled ecologies where vagaries of season, changing
conditions and circumstances create new plant alliances from year to year. It is
interesting how some plants have dominated yet later have been suppressed or
disappeared.

Look over the dying back self seeding limnanthes and see the Lychnis coronaria and foxgloves. At one stage a hundred square yards of lychnis was so successful it was becoming a problem

The biggest management
change by far was when we moved away from Bolton Percy sixteen years ago and my
intimate and regular attention which included a wide range of methods of weed
control was replaced by mere glyphosate spraying. Glyphosate was always the
thing that created the garden and made it possible for me to manage an acre in
two hours a week but now a quick spray-round once a month was all I could
manage. I started to introduce strong herbaceous clumps that I could easily
spray round.

I sometimes meet
visitors who imagine Bolton Percy cemetery cemetery has maintained itself without
human intervention for the last sixteen years!

At Worsbrough the centranthus in places is as dense as at the seaside

The annual limnanthes covers the ground better than many perennials

Most gardeners have
joked how some people take years for the poached egg plant, limnanthes to get
going in their gardens whilst others can barely get rid of it. I thrives
everywhere in Worsbrough cemetery and yet previous strong repeatedly seeding
limnanthes patches have now started to really struggle at Bolton Percy.

Montia sibirica at Worsbrough

I have had years when
certain plants totally dominatedBolton
Percy cemetery. Montia sibirica (claytonia) once made a complete pink carpet
and we would sell it with a health warning on an Open day. Now, you can barely find
any. It is wonderful plant if you have very shady places.

Similarly I have a old
acetate picture of the cemetery white as snow with Viola cornuta alba. Where is
the viola now? Well actually taking over at home where it loves my sandy soil.

I think it might be too
much for today to suggest that many of the explanations of changing plant
dominance lies in the mathematics! Perhaps another time.

Not only has the colour of the gardens changed from year to year they change from month to month when thousands of snowdrops, daffodils and blue bells flower in sequence

Geranium macrorrhizum has remained a reliable ground cover for forty years

Contrast between self established woodland and garden

When an old vaudeville artiste was buried a hundred years ago it was a pristine cemetery

Some readers will know about my current interest in using unmown fescue grass as ground cover

This was the only garden plant in Bolton Percy cemetery when I started. It still thrives

The futureFor forty years at Bolton Percy, twenty
years at Worsbrough I have influenced the garden ecology. I have retrieved the cemeteries
from the nettles and brambles.Their
development has been random and changing.

Approaching 75, although fit and healthy I
will not be able to go on much longer. Bolton Percy is secure as a garden for several years to come now that I have help from the volunteer C –team!

I
have informed Worsbrough I will finish at the end of 2017. I do hope they find
a way to continue.

Links to relevant postsPeter Williams wrote about how in his
dotage he would watch his own garden returning to nature. To an ecologist it
will be very revealing

Thursday, 13 October 2016

If you have come here via a search engine looking
for how to control willow herb you are a probably a good gardener. I take it that all regular
readers are too! When you have mastered most of the common weeds in your
garden epilobiums remain! Couch, ground elder, marestail and hairy bitter cress
might all be things of the past for you but epilobiums keep coming back. It’s a
good illustration of how nature abhors a vacuum and when one plant goes another
takes over.

It’s a little ingenuous of me putting
rosebay willow herb, Chamerion angustifolia, in the title to attract your
attention! That’s the name that most gardeners wrongly call their epilobiums. It is true that rosebay bay willow herb can be a problem but in the right place it is
really rather pretty and can enhance landscapes and roadside verges. If you
search on the net you will find places to actually buy it, especially the
lovely white one.

Rosebay willow herb enhances the verge

Epilobiums – the willow herbs

These are the two main culprits

This is by far the commonest epilobium in my garden

The good news is that epilobiums are rather
pretty. The bad news is that if you stop pulling them out they will completely
take over. To me it is a thorough nuisance and more than fifty per cent of my
weed control time is taken up by it. More bad news is that this post might do
little to help you!We can commiserate
together.

As a weed it spans the two normally
distinct problems ‘weeds-from-seed’ (wrongly dubbed ‘annual weeds’) and weeds
that are existing perennial structures. It is both! It blows in from seed and if left
alone survives as a ‘short lived perennial’ Worse if you let them seed they
remain evermore. If by dint of much effort you control them they fly back next
year from ‘dirty neighbours’. When the village plot flooded last year it even
came in by water!

It is so sneaky! It is able to hide itself
in your most vigorous dark herbaceous or woody clumps and July to October
suddenly appears from ‘nowhere’! It has of course been there all the time but
after each new day of pulling them out you find several more! Even after my
recent Open day when the garden had meticulous attention I pulled out another
half dozen the very day after!

Epilobiums are the perfect weed –
botanically speaking!

As far as I know these are the same species of epilobium. One is hunkering down for Winter the other is trying to make late Autumn flower

As a weed it knows every trick in the book.
Evolved alongside agriculture it has benefited from natural selection for
thousands of years. It loves the disturbed soil created by man and has
'learned' to combat most of the farmers' and gardener's wiles.

These have germinated since my last month’s visit to Bolton Percy. Other than deep midwinter it germinates all the year round

Perfectly hardy young seedlings, even ever-so-small ones, lurk
over-winter waiting for Spring. Larger seedlings germinated in late Summer, Autumn,
and early Winter make a tight ground hugging rosette ready to sprout in late
Spring and Summer. Depending on conditions in Summer it will flower and set
seed at three inches to four foot high.

It gives a curious satisfaction to easily yank out a flowering epilobium. You can do so with a tight and gentle pull from close to the ground.
Beware a careless break as it regenerates a tight cluster of several new shoots
to either flower or if late in the season await the next year.

This would easily pull out

In this patch there are far too many. Best to use a strimmer

If undisturbed in an adjacent paddock it is
truly perennial and sets seeds strongly in August and September. The air born seeds
fall like snow on your garden.

More seeds arriving

Seeds in Cathi’s paddock ready for take off

As an overwintering small plant it is resistant
to normal strength glyphosate. It took me years to appreciate that I was
spraying the same tight rosette several times!

Has it received enough spray?

In dry Summer even when other plants are wilting
epilobium never seems short of water. On the other hand it loves bogs and water
and will thrive at the edge of your pond.

Its trick of appearing from the dark middle
of your plant clumps in Summer is fuelled by stored energy reserves that enable it to
rapidly reach for the light and to expose its flowers and seeds. It builds up its strength when your herbaceous plants have died down or your shrubs have shed their
leaves. Those green ground hugging epilobium leaf clusters continue to
photosynthesize and build up their strength right through the Winter. Even under evergreens with the sun
low in the Winter sky, light reaches the darkest corners to sustain it!

Control of epilobium

Hand weeding

If it intimately
infiltrates your borders you just pull it out. Ever vigilant you might check
every day! If not yet flowering just cast the dead top on the ground to wilt
and die and return to the soil it's due.

If flowering and ready
to set seed I ought to advice you to take it away. In practice mine just gets
thrown on my lawn to be later shredded by the mower. Any seed has no chance in
my lawn!

Hoeing

You have several months
to hoe the rosettes through Autumn, Winter and Spring.

If it is windy and dry
they soon shrivel and die. Unfortunately in Winter the weather usually does not
comply!

The technique of hoeing is slightly
different to that recommended in my recent post on hoeing when you attempt to
cut a weed from seed at exactly ground level. In this case you need to undercut the
weed perhaps a quarter an inch down. This is necessary to detach all the
perennial parts but with the consequence that it might root again! In Winter
when it is cold I find re-rooting happens only very slowly and normally with
luck you will get a spell of windy weather – even a few weeks later - that will
kill it and all the goodness can then return to the ground. If you are tidy minded just rake it off but do not denude your garden of organic matter by
throwing it in the bin!

I have been known armed with a hoe to go
out on an epilobium hunt in Winter and detach my epilobium rosettes all over my
acre garden. I might on that occasion ignore any other weed but as I have
mentioned at that time I have very few.

Spraying

Most gardeners do not spray glyphosate in
their own borders as I do. Many of my posts suggest how you might do so and one
post particularly recommends the merit of spraying in Winter when many perennials
are dormant. Even if this is more than you dare many gardens have open spaces
that are very easy to spray. Unfortunately as mentioned in the middle of Winter
epilobiums are pretty resistant unless glyphosate is applied at perhaps one in
forty dilution of commercial 360gm per liter product. I often prefer to use
MCPA that I buy as Agritox. Note neither of these products are to be found at
your local garden center.

MCPA is an ingredient of lawn weedkiller
and is not suitable between delicate
plants. In my own case in the large spaces of Worsbrough cemetery where
huge drifts of epilobium blow in every year and it is almost my only weed I use
MCPA most of the time!

The good news is that when young epilobiums
are growing strongly when it is warmer in Summer, glyphosate at 1 in 50 dilution will
completely kill them. Unfortunately if they are already in flower it will be
too late to stop them seeding before they die! There are many months in Spring
and early Summer when glyphosate works very well!

The only good thing about epilobiums is
that you have nine months of the year to control the tight leafy rosettes when
ignorant observers take them to be garden plants!

Please note glyphosate sprayingis completely impracticalwhen epilobium is flowering in the middle of
your plants. Just pull them out! When epilobiums are setting seed it is too late to spray.

I have just found a white one

Rosebay willow herb

It looks very nice in Barnsley

Chamerion is a different kettle of fish to
epilobium! Just as invasive as epilobium when it comes in with flurries of air
born seed it is distinctly more perennial and as a perennial plant much more
aggressive. Large clumps can cover the ground and survive for forty years.
Probably much more if anyone had bothered to record them.

Acutely attuned to vacant derelict sites it
is famously invasive of stony neglected areas. One of its names ‘bomb site lily’
says it all.

This strong stand In Tignes has colonized neglected land previously disturbed by cultivation

In actual gardening practice I personally
find rosebay willow herb no problem at all! Although it does spread in from
seed, unlike epilobium it does not seem
to establish all year round.

Your problem may very well be that rosebay willow herb has been
standing many years on a site you wish to reclaim. If you use glyphosate it is
easy and you will be rid of it in a single season.

Quite a good time to spray it here in September

Regular readers please bear with me if I
repeat the rules for eliminating well established perennial weeds.

* Do not try to dig them out! Chopping the
roots creates thousands of new propagules.

* Let the weed make plenty of top.For the first application spray close to its mature size.
It might be the end of May for maximum glyphosate absorption. It is useless zapping new shoots as they emerge.

* If you can obtain 360 gm/litre commercial
glyphosate – it comes under many trade names as it is now out of patent – use
it at about 1 in fifty dilution and thoroughly wet the leaves short of ‘run
off’’.

* Several weeks later respray shoots you might have missed and any weed
regeneration. They should be strong and green. Its pretty useless repeat
spraying old half dead yellow and brown stubble.

* You might need to re spray two or three
times to eliminate a previously strong
stand of rosebay willow herb.

Bits and bats

Most historical references to rose bay
willow herb suggest it came to the fore in the UK in about 1850. Before that it
was a rare shy woodland fringe plant. I find this difficult to believe when you
consider most of Europe shares this now virulent weed. There must have been
plenty of genetic diversity to be shared if plants hybridised together! One
reference I found says in the US their plants have twice as many genes.
Scientists recognize that ‘ploidy’ occurs in this genus.

Rosebay’s historical thuggish emergence is
sometimes described as a ‘genetic mystery’. I suspect no one has really tried
to find out.

Rosebay willow herb is a beautiful plant.
It is also host to magnificent hawk moths. I allow a few plants in Worsbrough
cemetery where it looks rather nice. When I started there were masses holding
their own against the acre of brambles! The willow herb was much easier to
eliminate.

When I took early retirement and became a
freelance garden trouble shooter, plants lady, nurseryman and Chelsea winning
flower arranger Jacky Barber hired me to do specialist jobs in her garden. My
first task was to spray out weed in her overgrown herbaceous borders. There
were masses of rosebay willow herb that I diligently sprayed. Jacky later informed
me it was the white one that she treasured! She knew of course that one
spraying would merely reduce it to manageable proportions.

She did not sack me! There are not many
garden labourers who can eliminate well established perennial weed amongst
herbaceous plants! Jacky is now a very dear friend!